Portable communication devices, such as mobile phones, are widely used for efficient and instant communication and information transmission. Such portable devices may have a phonebook stored in its memory, which includes phone numbers of a user's contacts, and sometimes, phone numbers of businesses frequently used by the user. For example, the user may order pizza from a pizza eatery, e.g., Papa John's™, every Friday, and the phone number may be stored in the mobile phone.
However, the user may sometimes want to dial a business phone number that is not saved in the phonebook. For example, the user may want to try Domino's™ pizza for the first time. As another example, the user may travel outside of his home city, and want to order from a local Papa John's™ store. Using a conventional mobile phone, the user has to manually find the phone number first, remember or record it, and then dial it on the mobile phone. For example, the user may have to search online using his mobile phone, look at a yellow page, or call a phone number lookup service (e.g., a 411 service), to find the phone number. Manual phone number searches may be time-consuming and inconvenient for the user.
Accordingly, some new dialing methods and systems have been developed to improve the user experience on business phone number dialing. For example, after the user finds the phone number through an online search using the mobile phone, a dialogue box may show up on the phone screen, asking the user if he wants to dial the phone number. Upon user confirmation, the phone number will be automatically dialed. Although such methods and systems may improve user experience by saving effort to remember/record and manually dial the phone number, they are still suboptimal. For example, the user still has to use a web browsing application on the mobile phone and manually lookup the phone number. In addition, such methods always requires the Internet connection and doesn't support the “offline” mode where the Internet is not always available to the user (e.g., roaming in a different country).
Accordingly, there exists a need for an improved method and system for efficient business dialing.